Throughout the competition we visited various experts to deepen our knowledge in different themes related to our project. In this way we were able to improve and adjust our project approach by adopting the specialists´ advices.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Jockenhövel - ITA at RWTH Aachen
Figure 2 Itaconic acid pathway including cis-aconitate decarboxylase
The compil
We thank professor Jockenhövel for the very interesting and revealing expert discussion about tissue engineering at the ITA in Aachen.
This expert discussion gave us the insight that most currently used plastics in medical applications (for example PLA) are degraded acidic in the body. In this point our polymer has an advantage.
Dr. Harald König, Reinhard Heil, Christoph Schneider - ITAS KIT Karlsruhe
The three experts at ITAS helped us bring forward our application scenario with a very interesting talk analyzing our project's usage.
Dr. Phillip Urban - 3D Printing Technology IGD Fraunhofer
The expert talk with Dr. Urban gave us a good overview about 3D printing technologies. Our used method SLA 3D printing is currently maket-leading and can be improved by the similar method Polymer-Jetting.
Prof. Dr. Chichkov - LZH Laserzentrum Hannover
Dr. Chickkov is working with Two-Photon Polymerisation that is even more precise than SLA 3D printing. We thank him for his offer to test our polymer with his devices and for the backround information about alternative photo initiators.
Prof. Michael Grätzel, Toby Meyer - EPFL Lausanne
Prof. Dr. Grätzel - Old memories come in mind: Visiting professor Grätzel and Toby Meyer once again to thank them for their support at our last year´s project. They wished us success, as we just them best for the future! Hopefully we will meet again!
Conference: Community labs and synthetic biology
In 2012 our team held a public panel discussion about bioethics. Moreover in the last years we had a lot of debates about the future of synthetic biology and the chances and risks of community labs, during our work for Synenergene and the german iGEM meetups. Since a new biohackerspace is forming in Darmstadt, with close connections to our team, we decided to lead a panel discussion about these two topics.
As a first step we had a round table discussion with the iGEM team of RWTH Aachen. Here we talked about the pros, cons and possible trends of community labs (please visit the wiki of RWTH Aachen for further details and results). This formed the fundament for our panel discussion.
